@MrWizard Are you sure it was a good idea to close this? Code review and code golf are two very different things. Your original question only received answers about code golf, and when the new question was closed, it effectively shut down discussion on the code review issue.

Of course I'm not asking for it to be unmerged. That would not make any sense at this point. But I think in particular instance closing it didn't have any positive effect.

@Szabolcs I am sorry that it had a bad effect, but I still do believe it was a duplicate. I really am not sure how it could have been handled better. I guess I could have edited my question to only apply to "code golf" but that was never my intention when asking. I see that you never edited my question to address your specific concerns. Would you please try that?

The mean monthly post count on MathGroup is ~840 for the past three years, based on this data: https://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica/about?hl=en-GB . If our A51 stats can be trusted, we have 12.3 post per day with an answer ratio of 2.3, which means `12.3 * (1+2.3) * 30 = 1218` posts per month. Also, because of the possibility cleanup, comments and edits, and the lack of endless duplicate answers, our post quality is higher than MathGroup's.

I haven't been following MathGroup recently, but I expect it still is frequented by knowledgeable users with interesting posts. I have hoped that SE would free MG of some Q&A traffic and allow it to focus on more "philosophical" material.

Another noticeable effect is that the MathGroup post frequency has decreased noticeably. It has not been as low as in last month since 2001 December. It shows that people are flocking over, but whether the decrease post frequency over there is good or bad.... it's not so clear.

I don't follow regularly. To be honest, mostly I've been showing off this site there by posting links from Mathematica.SE that answer questions perfectly.

My impression is that it's the same as it used to be. The main problems are lots and lots of duplicate answers because of the moderation delay and a few low quality beginner posts because the format is not really suitable for preventing those.

Occasionally there are answers that are better than ours, for similar questions.

Actually, I think I should make a note whenever I see that.

The enthusiasm is much greater here, and questions almost always get answers (which is not true for MG). Just the fact that it's usually easier to follow the conversation here makes for better answers in the end. But I wouldn't mind if a few more experts came over.

MG still allows some topics that just aren't suitable for SE. For example, announcing packages, or simple discussion about topics without the QA framework. I hope Mma.SE will not kill MG.

@MrWizard About the ticks question: the main question is how to put the tick labels on the right hand side of an axis instead of the left hand side, so they won't intersect with the plot. I'm not sure how to do this conveniently, but I think I've seen something like this somewhere ...

Take e.g. Plot[Sin[x], {x, -6, 6}], and note how the curve intersects the -0.5 label. He wants to move that label to the right, only below the x axis.

It's a very reasonable question ... your supervisor asks you to move the ticks to the other side and won't understand why you'd have any trouble with such a simple operation. For lack of time you might do it in Illustrator and hope you won't need to regenerate the figure ...

@Szabolcs is there a way to make Rotate do a simple translation with its extra arguments, or make Translate (or similar) operate on an arbitrary expression? I'm trying to some the tick label problem in this way.

@Szabolcs Being a US native, I'm used to the car culture despite not liking it. I much preferred the time I spent in London or Atlanta where you could get everywhere you wanted on decent (and inexpensive) public transport.

@Heike It certainly doesn't help. Add to that, there is a strong lobbying group that stymied improving gas mileage and emission standards for years. On the other hand, California has the most stringent emissions standards in the US, and if a car will pass there, it will pass any where in the states. This is, of course, due to the problem in Los Angeles. :)

@rcollyer Hell, if you're living in a place with less than perfect terrain, sure. But most of the buyers of these things travel on paved ground, and will likely throw a fit if even a speck of dust gets on their ride. Ugh.

@Heike I can see it with our toddler. His "equipment" requires a lot of space, and our car is a little undersized for it. Also, there are newer models of some that get better gas mileage than our car. :P

@JM That is the primary argument. My uncle-in-law likes to point out that if you need 4-wheel drive, you shouldn't be driving.

@JM most people don't like mini-vans, and my wife despises station wagons, so SUV it is (when we get the cash to upgrade, that is). We rented one for a long weekend a couple of years ago, and liked the model. That and the very good gas mileage, and there is a hybrid version out there (30 hwy, 33 city).

@JM I don't think I ever really understood this argument, at least as far as it goes in the US. On the one hand it could be interpreted as a view that the rights of legal persons should be distinct from and a subset of those of natural persons, but I have never heard it couched in those terms. On the other, it could be interpreted more literally as a call for legal personhood to be abolished altogether, but it seems to me that only

the anarcho-capitalists have truly understood what this would actually imply and support it as such. I really can't see the Michael Moore crowd advocating what is essentially an anarcho-capitalist utopia. So, have I missed something fundamental?

Why do so many new users turn up on SO? --> stackoverflow.com/questions/10884034/… I often flag for migration, but it might depend on luck (and which moderator sees the flag) if the question ever gets migrated ...

@OleksandrR My reading of it is your "on the one hand". The problem is that corporations have capabilities persons don't have, so the playing field isn't terribly fair if you give corporations the rights of persons as well.

@JM Corporations are legal people though, unless you want to discard nearly 900 years of English common law and start from scratch. For instance, I can't imagine that anyone would seriously argue that legal people should not be entitled to protection under the law and access to the justice system. However, certain rights of natural persons, such as voting, can sensibly be withheld from legal persons.

@JM I see, okay. I've never heard it expressed in that way, but at least the argument makes sense when put in those terms. It had struck me that abolishing the concept of legal persons and corporations altogether would essentially abrogate the modern concept of the state and all state apparatus such as criminal law, which perhaps is not what is really intended with that argument.

@OleksandrR I am of the opinion that legal persons have no inherent rights, they have privileges that they must continually pay for (i.e. taxes), but they should be easily revokable. In a recent Supreme Court case, Citezen's United, corporations were given the right (with only a few caveats) to dump large amount of cash into our political system on the pretext that as they are just groups of people, then they should have the same rights as the individual.

@OleksandrR that is an interesting question, and it has not occurred to me. Truthfully, I view government bodies to be distinct from corporate bodies, although, in some sense, the law treats them as the same. However, their purposes differ drastically, i.e. a corporation ultimately is intended for profit.

Is, say, the president, immune from personal legal charges resulting from the actions of the government? Or must he/she defend themselves in court if any charges are brought? Who operates the justice system in this framework?

@OleksandrR Currently, that is true, well, mostly true. The president can be charged with a crime, then Congress is empowered to try them for the purposes of removing them from office. To some extent, they're even shielded from personal law suits during their tenure.

@JM the problem is, the state is a corporation, unless you have some figurehead through which all the powers of the state are exercised (e.g. king/queen/president). In the US cases are not brought as "President vs. X"; they are "United States vs. X" or "Name of State vs. X"

@rcollyer okay, well that's fair enough, and I do agree with you. But the common conception of "an individual" is legally known as "a natural person". There are other types of persons too, that have different types of rights.

@OleksandrR true. Let me clarify that then. A legal person (as distinct from a natural one) should not have any rights, per se, but should be granted privileges which may include some of the rights of a natural person. This includes governmental bodies. A governmental body, though, would have access to some privileges that should not be granted to a natural person: removal of property, liberty, or life come to mind. A non-governmental legal person, though, should never approach such privileges.

@rcollyer a very interesting point in itself. Should natural persons have rights (say, constitutionally enumerated), then, or are there no "rights" per se but only laws governing how persons behave toward one another? (I would be in favour of the latter, since it is more legally actionable.)

@OleksandrR the latter contains a trap: by restricting a natural person's rights to an enumerated set, then any extension of those requires extraordinary action, hence the inclusion of the tenth amendment in the US Bill of Rights. It implies that non-enumerated rights still exist. This was used in Roe v. Wade to imply the right to privacy.

@rcollyer a good point, although then we have the difficulty of determing where rights come from in the first place. Let's take, say, the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Legally, how is "pursuit of happiness" (or even happiness itself) defined and who has responsibility for protecting this right in practice?

@rcollyer I think the 10th amendment goes a long way to avoiding that specific problem by saying that rights (of the Federal Govt) have to be enumerated and are only legally actionable as such.

@rcollyer yes, I agree. Generally they are negative rights (prohibiting unwarranted interference), rather than positive ones (guaranteeing certain opportunities). I think the former is less legally troublesome.

@rcollyer indeed. I think US constitutional law is a fascinating subject. In particular, sometimes the reasons for the Supreme Court deciding in a particular way seem quite unexpected (for example in Brown v. Board of Education, where the decision was undoubtedly the morally correct one, but purely legally that interpretation doesn't obviously suggest itself, at least not to me).

@OleksandrR that is an interesting point. A previous court ruled that "separate but equal" was fine, but in Brown v. Board, though, it was argued that "separate" implies "unequal" violating equal protection under the law.

@rcollyer yes, exactly. Undoubtedly in practice the separate facilities were not at all equal, so Brown could have won his case on that point alone. The aspect of it I find particularly interesting is the precedent that "separate" was thereafter considered to be inherently unequal.

Another clause I find has an interesting application is the regulation of inter-state commerce. The ways in which certain sorts of activity are designated commerce or not, or inter-state or not, are fascinating to read about.

@rcollyer no, it's broader than that. For instance I recall a case of a farmer who grew and milled his own wheat in order to avoid having to buy it from another state which at the time was subject to quota. (Unfortunately I forget the name of that case.) The ruling was that his activity could be regulated simply because it was undertaken in order to avoid inter-state commerce.

@OleksandrR A case that was merged into the Brown v. Board case at the Supreme Court hearing was the Davis v. Board case where the students staged a walk out due to the terrible condition of their school.

@JM I flagged them both using "This is borderline off-topic here, and will likely get better reception over at Mathematica.se. It should be migrated." which is less true on the second question, but we'll see.

I don't have a high flag weight, so it may be a couple of days.

@OleksandrR I vaguely remember that. I'm not sure I agreed with the decision.

@rcollyer I also find the case of the sugar growing industry rather fascinating and perhaps amusing. As a result of extensive laws basically propping up sugar prices enacted in the name of regulating inter-state commerce, the market for sugar in the US was almost destroyed and the situation persists to this day that high-fructose corn syrup is extensively used instead of sugar in the US but is almost unknown anywhere else in the world.

I am trying to use Sow/Reap in Mathematica to replace Append in my code. The problem is that I need to define the tags within my code, but doing so doesn't reap the desired results. A simplified version of my code is
Clear[tag];
Reap[tag = {a,b}; Sow[1, a];Sow[2,b];, tag]
However, if I define ...

@rcollyer I agree, albeit I would personally distinguish more strongly between helpful and unhelpful regulations rather than industries requiring or not requiring regulation. I think some of the regulations placed on the banking industry have been net harmful by contributing to the formation of just a few very large banks in preference to a plurality of smaller ones in competition.

@rcollyer deregulation certainly allowed the mergers to happen, but also to a large extent the legal burdens now placed upon banks (under, e.g., the PATRIOT act) allow only those big enough to afford a large team of well paid lawyers to survive.

I wonder if the VBA stuff could perhaps be attacked by way of F#, which would make the pattern matching aspect a lot easier. (I don't actually know F#, so how feasible any of it would be even then, I'm not sure. But at least you wouldn't have to fight VBA.)

@rcollyer I know you've gone now but I thought you might appreciate this: some researchers in the European Psi-K collaboration are having a density functional popularity contest! If you like or hate any specific functionals, you can cast your votes now. :)

@JM No clue. I just got this in my email this morning. These are solid-state physicists though so I think anything B3LYP related is going to crash and burn.

@JM unrelated, but do you know of any ICA implementations in Mathematica? For a while I've felt it could be useful but I don't know that much about it and don't really have time lately to read the literature and implement something myself.

@OleksandrR In Mathematica, no. I would admit I haven't gone through the papers for those in detail, though, nor have I extensively experimented with the methods, so I can't give a "X is the best" opinion. Sorry. :(

...though translating this to Mathematica seems to be not too difficult to do.

@JM not to worry. I did a quick search for Mathematica implementations previously but it seems like nearly everyone uses MATLAB. Unfortunately I don't know MATLAB and since I also don't understand the methods, translation is not exactly feasible. Oh well...

@OleksandrR Ah, $O(n^3)$ (PseudoInverse[] that is). The one I wrote was a bit more elaborate, but $O(n^2)$. I'm not sure what LinearAlgebra`VandermondeInverse is using internally, but I suppose it's the $O(n^2)$ one...

@JM yes, I wasn't too concerned with that since the design matrix isn't really large, and anyway it seemed to me that it was sometimes better to do the inverse in exact rationals due to numerical instability for high-order polynomials and long windows.

@JM also I needed the whole matrix to get the skewed windows needed to deal with the endpoints.

@JM I'm not at all sure that my method deals with the endpoints correctly when you're taking the derivatives rather than just smoothing, so I would definitely be interested in seeing that. (I never needed the derivatives; smoothing was enough for me, so I didn't really go over it too carefully in that case.)

@Heike The mere mention of "Excel spreadsheets" worries me every time. Recently a colleague confessed that he uses Excel for his data analysis and even production of graphs for publication. Needless to say I was shocked.

@Heike I'm reminded of this: digilander.libero.it/foxes/MultiPrecision.htm. While a valiant effort to make Excel useful for something, development was halted because Excel's just so broken that even using extended precision isn't particularly effective for helping it get the right answer. Not encouraging for financial applications!

This question is asking about how to prevent Eigenvalues from "reordering" the eigevnalues (sorting by magnitude), but unless I'm mistaken there's no order defined by the matrix, so it's not clear to me what the OP means.

I am considering using Mathematica with Wolfram Workbench as a standard platform for calculations and programs in a large engineering department. I am looking for a solution that would provide better validation, documentation and revision control than Excel spreadsheets with VisualBasic macros. A...

@SjoerdCdeVries I would say it's an experiment they really need to perform themselves, but maybe somebody who went through something similar (migrating from systm Z to Mathematica) might be able to provide a usable answer...

@SjoerdCdeVries I felt that question was just as subjective as this one... The reason I didn't vote to close either of them was because although they were soft/subjective, both were well reasoned, coherent, gave a practical situation that they faced and I got the feeling that they (at least the OP of this new question) had a grasp of what they would like to take away from the comments/answers.

It wasn't a blanket "Has anyone developed a large system in mma and if so what are the challenges you faced?" kind of question. Perhaps, this might be better suited to Programmers, but I wouldn't be opposed to leaving it here (would argue for it to be here, in fact).

I don't think that by not closing this, we have lost any moral ground in closing other NC questions.

@SjoerdCdeVries aren't we allowed to have subjective questions? I realise they're not welcomed on some other sites, such as SO, but this being our site, can't we decide for ourselves whether it's a good question or not? IMO, asking for opinions in the context of a community of experts is different to standing on street-corners shouting for help (as one might interpret such a question on SO, especially e.g. C++ or Java tags).

@Heike I would never have thought to put rice pudding into a pie! But it sounds like it would be healthier than, say, a cheesecake, which would be an advantage if it's addictive... might have to try that one.

Okay, so everyone's heard of the Jacobian and the Hessian... does anyone know if there's a standard name for the tensor of third derivatives? If there is, I haven't heard of it.

@OleksandrR This type of pie is typical for the south of the netherlands and parts of belgium. The crust is made of a yeast dough and can have various fillings such as cherries and apricots, but my favourite by far is the one with a rice pudding filling, especially when topped with whipped cream and chocolate shavings.

@OleksandrR Sure, we can have subjective questions, but not any subjective question. Differentiating between the good and the bad ones is, unfortunately, a bit subjective. Always good to discuss them to see what fits this site. I found the following blog useful in this regard.

Stack Exchange is about questions with objective, factual answers. We’ve been crystal clear about this for as long as I can remember, even back to the earliest, pre-beta days of Stack Overflow. It’s right there in the standard Stack Exchange FAQ:

What kind of questions should I not ask here?

Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered!

Thus, questions that are not answerable — discussions, debates, opinions — should be closed as subjective. It seems simple enough: Fact good; opinion and discussion bad. But why? …

Compare this with the description of the 'not constructive' description "As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, see the FAQ for guidance."

@Szabolcs No, not really. This is not an area in which I feel myself particularly comfortable.